David McElroy

I was meeting Wednesday with a man who’s interested in joining my company as an agent. He had told me about the twists and turns of his own career, and he asked how I had ended up where I am professionally.

I told him about my early successes in journalism. I mentioned owning several small publishing businesses, then becoming a publisher for a newspaper chain — and then spending years as a political consultant. And on and on. I tried to quickly summarize a long story.

“I still haven’t decided what I want to do when I grow up,” I joked.

I didn’t mention the specifics of the many failures in my life. I didn’t talk about the dreams that I’ve given up. And I definitely didn’t talk about the role that luck and chance have played, for both good and bad.

The truth is that I’ve felt lost for much of my life. I started out with a life map that was totally wrong. I trusted cultural training that I didn’t know to question. I set goals that would have made me miserable if I’d achieved them. And the things that now matter most to me would have sounded trivial or inconsequential when I started.

If the 25-year-old David could see where I am now, he would have been dismayed. And if the current version of myself had ended up where my 25-year-old self expected to go, I would be miserable.

My losses and defeats have taught me plenty of important lessons. My wins and successes have felt great to my ego, but they’ve taught me virtually nothing.

Life has been just the opposite of what I expected.

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For the last couple of days, I’ve had an intense desire to return to a restaurant where I haven’t eaten in years.

Cosmo’s Pizza was one of my two favorite pizza places in Birmingham for many years. (Salvatore’s is the other.) A political client first took me there in the early 1990s and it quickly became a place that I would visit over and over — with many different people.

It was in the heart of Birmingham’s artsy Five Points South area. It was eclectic. The crowd could be strange. There was energy and weirdness in the air. I loved it.

Cosmo’s closed permanently in 2016, so it’s been a decade. But over the weekend, I found myself intensely craving the experience of being there.

I was craving the pizza, but I was craving the atmosphere even more. And after thinking about it for a couple of days, I’ve realized I was craving something else. I was craving some of the experiences I’ve had there — and it finally hit me that I was craving something about the people I’ve taken there, too.

This felt like more than simple nostalgia, though. I had the odd feeling that something in me felt like returning to the past to finish some unfinished emotional business. Every woman I dated for years went to Cosmo’s at least once — and some went there many times with me.

As I tried to get to sleep in the wee hours of Sunday night, I puzzled over what I was feeling. And it suddenly hit me that there was something I needed to say — to women I’ll never even talk with again.

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When I answered my phone, the young man told me his name, but not much else. I was still trying to figure out why he had called when he suddenly blurted out his disagreement with me.

“What you said doesn’t prove God!” he said with certainty.

I suddenly realized this man had gone to the trouble of finding my phone number and calling just to tell me how wrong I had been about something I’d written.

I rarely write overtly about religion or theology, but I’ve said a lot recently that’s required me to refer to elements of my faith more than usual. Something I’d written had annoyed this man.

At first, I thought he was an angry atheist calling to challenge my non-rational belief in my creator. I still wasn’t clear about what I had written to annoy him, but I explained that he seemed to misunderstand my intent.

“If you think I’m trying to prove anything, you’ve mistaken me for something I’m not,” I told him. “I’m just reporting what I’ve experienced. What you believe is up to you.”

That’s when he surprised me.

It turned out he was an angry theist, not an angry atheist. He was annoyed with me because I hadn’t cited the apologetic argument and the “proof text” that he had been taught.

He told me I shouldn’t talk about my own subjective spiritual experience. He felt certain that it was a waste of time to talk about love and silence and “fuzzy emotions” about hate and forgiveness.

I responded as gently as I could.

“Have you ever actually read the Sermon on the Mount?” I asked.

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